Caught in a Trap: The Modern Sports Fan

The last decade should be regarded as a sporting golden age. In that time a fair argument could be made that fans have seen the greatest club football team come to dominate Europe, while the greatest national football team ever assembled fundamentally changed the sport. Possibly the best three tennis players ever to have played the game have fought personal duels over multiple  of Grand Slam finals, while one of the greatest rugby union teams ever assembled finally won a world cup. Eight years ago, two of cricket’s heavyweights slugged it out in what was widely acclaimed as the greatest test series ever played. In athletics Usain Bolt has redefined what a human body can achieved whilst entrancing the world with once in a generation charisma. In American Football, Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, and Peyton Manning have ushered in an era of offensive dominance through sheer passing power while in baseball Boston Red Sox broke the Curse of the Bambino in one of the greatest turnarounds in sport. In swimming Michael Phelps won a record number of Olympic gold medals.

Wherever you look, across a wide range of sports there are figures of revolutionary brilliance, singlehandedly changing what is deemed possible and how the game is played. These are absurd times and will be remembered as such for years to come, and yet to truly enjoy the times fans have to close their ears to the incessant whispers of suspicion. In no era have elite athletes been so scrutinised based on their choice of doctor and never has a passed drug test invoked such suspicion. There are many causes for this environment but one stands out above all others.

There is, of course, one achievement left off the above list, one that no longer exists even in record books. Lance Armstrong capped the greatest sporting story of all time by, not just winning but, dominating his seventh Tour de France in 2005. The whispers were present even then, so much so that his acceptance speech was an attack on all those who had accused him. He told them he was “sorry you don’t believe in miracles.” It is, therefore, fitting that his sporting legacy is to kill the miracle. When 16 year old Ye Shiwen stormed to 400 and 200m medley gold medals at London 2012 an American coach verbalised the silent fears of many by raising the spectre of doping. It was an unfair and widely criticised attack but it was also a sign of the times. Miracles don’t happen and 16 year old girls don’t swim 50m faster than male Olympic athletes.

The manner of Armstrong’s deception has made the damage so much worse. He evaded drug testers for years by managing his life around deceiving them. He received advanced warning of testers, hid needles in Coke cans, and lied his way out of a failed test. For years he was the most tested athlete on earth, the holy grail of the anti doping police and yet he remained free to commit his crimes and steal his victories. The damage done to testing has been devastating. Passed drug tests mean nothing when the greatest cheat in sporting history was caught with witnesses not blood. Marion Jones was famously the first athlete to ever be banned for drugs without failing a test but it is now a familiar occurrence. It casts suspicion on all athletes, creating a time when the absence of proof becomes proof in itself. In the midst of this mess Spanish police uncovered tens of blood packs as part of Operation Puerto, silent witnesses to uncaught cheats which may now be destroyed rather than investigated.

The whispers would matter less had they not been proved so right in the Armstrong’s case. The years between 2000 and 2013 saw a titanic battle for the soul of cycling between those journalists who saw nothing but a cheat in Armstrong and those who bought into his cult of personality. Armstrong himself was a large part of this battle, confronting and attacking his growing legion of doubters. It made his believers all the more sure, all the more betrayed. The battle became cruel and bitter as his return to cycling was described as an end to cycling’s “remission” and that the “cancer of cycling” had returned. All the time he was defended by people now unable to believe anyone’s self defence. It has given all conspiracy theorists the faint air of respectability. Right too often to be stopped clocks, they are instead the realists, those who can see beyond the superficial brilliance of so many. They exist in a world without heroes, only a list of the yet to be caught.

The case of Armstrong introduced a new term into the sporting vernacular, omertà. It is the all pervasive silence of the peloton which protects cycling from outsiders with questions and from insiders with truths to tell. Perhaps a belief in the honesty of competition was naive, but now it is simple idiocy. The omertà is the final spit in the face to all honest fans. It’s a tacit admission that, while fans may want genuine competition, the athletes would not let something as important as a bike race up to chance. Instead the result is determined beforehand by the quality of your chemist. Years after the fact, Armstrong’s colleagues lined up to confess their and his sins. It was apparently the peloton’s open secret and cyclists admitted bullying out of the sport those competitors who spoke out in favour of clean racing. The omertà is the painful truth that a sport lied to its fans and lied in full knowledge. But its damage is worse than that. The omertà is a clear message to fans. To the athletes, the fans don’t matter, they don’t need to know and athletes themselves must be protected over all other interests. The fans are excluded, reduced to being inhabitants of Plato’s cave, watching the shadow competition on the wall for so long they have forgotten what genuine contest is.

Armstrong wasn’t just a winner, he was a dominant animal. He surveyed the Tour with the air of a conquering general. It was a form of brilliance utterly without parallel in his sport as the Tour ceased to be a sporting event but became a month long victory parade for cycling’s one true King. Now, like all former Kings the ghost of Armstrong wanders amongst his former top table. Team Sky are left unable to enjoy their celebratory champagne as they yell at empty chairs. “We are clean,” they scream, “we are different,” they plead as their congregation looks on with pitying silence. Their madness is compounded by the curious parallel world they inhabit where they are celebrated more in failure than in success. If they can crack, if they can lose, if they’re weak; then they might be real. It is sport’s saddest truth; Armstrong killed brilliance.

Once longevity was proof, but that has been discarded now. Now any competitor is a future Armstrong, if he can be guilty then anyone can be guilty. It is the suspicion that hangs over all achievements. Perhaps no one can be that much better than their rivals, perhaps humans can only do so much. Harder, faster, better, faker. Instead sports fans are left to look at cycling’s hollow victories and ponder the damage a failed test could do to their sport. A presenter of the Football Ramble idly joked about Barcelona’s doctor but what if they were cheating? What would become of tiki taka? What if Federer, Nadal or Djokovic were doping? Could tennis survive? And the greatest fear, what if Bolt was a fake? Could sport recover? The man who saved athletics would be the man who killed competition.*

We don’t want to think these thoughts, we don’t want these people to be cheats but the fear remains. This is a fear not just of cheats, but of success itself. If one man is too good, if one man becomes our sport incarnate; what if he were just another Armstrong? We live in an age where Tours de France remain without a victor as a clean cyclist cannot be found to acclaim. An age where baseball records may be asterisked as potentially unclean and where 99 blood bags sit in Spain under the custody of a court as legal battles continue to see if their secrets will be revealed. This is the house Armstrong built, it is made of cards and I fear an oncoming storm.

*To be clear, there is no suggestion any of these people are drug cheats.

Reflections on … the Ambleside to Grasmere Coffin Route

The two hour walk from Ambleside to Grasmere via Rydal is a gentle trip heavy with historical significance. For hundreds of years the only consecrated ground in the area was St. Oswald’s Church in Grasmere meaning that Ambleside’s dead would be taken on a final journey round Rydal Mount and past White Moss Common.  So called coffin routes are a common feature of rural Britain, appearing as central parishes tried to retain control by withholding burial rights from outlying churches. In the case of the Ambleside to Grasmere route it now exists as a public bridleway and is frequented by less mobile walkers glad for its moderate inclines.

The Lake District is a place as untouched by modernity as anywhere in the industrialised Western world can manage meaning these odd relics of vastly different times can still exist in some form.  When a modern walker, following the route, steers off the tarmac scar of the A591 just after Ambleside, they stroll through a camping ground and past Rydal Hall, now converted into a hotel and tea room. The tourist trade sustains the area almost single handed, and businesses are keen to drive every opportunity but amongst the throng of wi fi enabled cafes selling lattes and paninis remains hints of a rural tradition. The path takes in the home of the Rydal Sheepdog trials, and sheep farming is common throughout the valley. The traditional Herdwick sheep are ubiquitous, looking on with something approaching bemusement at the hordes of walkers traipsing across their fields.

The walk is also a reminder that this is a place that inspires art as it takes in two of Wordsworth’s homes as well as a more recent woodland sculpture walk and an intriguing ‘Art Yurt’. For both the contemporary art and crafters and the Lake Poets, the area represents an escape. For one it is from the modern world, and for the other the rapid industrialisation of Britain. Wordsworth lived through the Industrial Revolution and escaped it by heading to the Lakes; the inhabitants of the Art Yurt have seen its ultimate effects and similarly seek the timeless calm of Cumbria. The Lake District encompasses the kind of pocket sized wonder that Britain specialises in and Bill Bryson once espoused. It’s natural beauty that is comprehendible and personal. The beauty of the fells and tarns is on a scale that fits to the human imagination and doesn’t bludgeon the individual with the scale of nature. Peaks can be conquered, Lakes circled and views memorised. For me, these views represent childhood holidays, roadside cooking and my first experience of wonder, for Wordsworth they inspired poems of death, separation and grief. Like the surfaces of the tarns, the views reflect the beholder.

After Rydal Hall the walk continues beneath the craggy face of Nag scar and presents views across Rydal Water and towards Loughrigg. Here the walker is reminded of the purpose of this archaic trail. A flattened stone sits to the side of the path, worn smooth through use and time. It is often used now as a bench by weary travellers but once it was a penultimate resting place for the inhabitants of Ambleside. A moment of rest for coffin bearers on the weary trudge towards St. Oswald’s is now a poignant reminder of the difficulty of this trip for the original users. It is perhaps a symbol of our humanity that these are the lengths we are prepared for to give proper respect to the dead. The importance of a proper end would only matter to a species that sees life as more than just a temporary state of being. The ancient followers of this path were fathers, mothers, sons and daughters, with lives and hopes, beginnings, and endings. Social beings all, with ties to this environment and their community.

The path finally descends past Dove Cottage and winds towards the middle of Grasmere. Nowadays it passes shops selling postcards, fridge magnets and distantly created fudge within local packages before reaching its final destination in the shaded churchyard of St. Oswalds. Here amongst the dead of Grasmere, Ambleside, Rydal and elsewhere lies the gravestone of Wordsworth. A genius whose timeless words have been passed from human to human for over a century and yet still speak to each reader as if written by their own hand.

The coffin route reminds the walker of the shared bonds of humanity that stretch across time and place. There is something universal in the lengths these old Cumbrians would go to bury their dead, in the simple wonder that the Lake District can inspire and in the literature created by Wordsworth and his like. It is, appropriately, a humbling and quiet journey through some of Britain’s most green and pleasant lands.